From
an Idea to a Functioning Mobile App in 48 Hours

Nov 23, 2015

Garage48 hackathons are 48-hour working
sessions, where dedicated teams test their market and build a minimum viable
product (MVP). Marit Sall and Caroline Rute from the Startup Estonia team decided
to share their experience from the hackathon weekend in this blog post, to
encourage people passionate about their idea, especially women, to take part in
the next hackathons.

Marit
and Caroline were part of team Soundy in the Garage48 Tourism hackathon in
Pärnu on 13-15 November. Soundy is a social alarm clock that lets you wake-up
your friends with personalised voice messages. It allows people to stay
connected with their loved ones, who are away. This app helps people feel
closer across geographic distance because it allows you to feel like you are
waking up next to your loved one. Alternatively, you can, of course, use the
app to have fun and stay connected to your friends – why not wake them up with
a prank?

Startup
Estonia was one of the sponsors of the event.

Preparation – do
it!

Garage48
organised several pre-events before the hackathon to share information, connect
people and help prepare for hacking. This was the perfect time to start talking
about your idea, to get feedback and find potential teammates.

Marit,
who is behind the business idea of Soundy, said that pre-events created
confidence in her that she really can pull the idea off. “I
found the best developers, Oleg and Michael, already at the pre-event. We
discussed the idea and very soon had a good understanding of how we needed to
start and whom else we needed in our team. These pre-events also enabled me to
test my pitching skills. Maarika and Elise, the organisers, have seen hundreds
of pitches over the years and can share tips and tricks of a successful pitch,
that will, in the end, secure you an awesome team!” said Marit.

Besides
pre-events, it is also suggested to validate your market and think about
technical solutions. Marit talked to friends around the world, to see if
there’s a need for the service. She even consulted some engineers from Facebook
and WhatsApp to learn about the technical side of the app. In addition, she
discussed the idea with Startup Estonia’s colleagues at SmartCap to learn about future
funding opportunities. “It was actually the VC from SmartCap, who helped me the
most in tweaking the business idea and monetisation model,” explained Marit.

Day 1 – who else is
passionate?

The
event started on Friday night: Marit arrived in Pärnu and delivered an
inspiring pitch about her idea.

After
the pitching session, team formation began and Marit managed to snatch up
inspiring individuals who are all brilliant at their work. Typically, Garage48
teams have up to 8 members, but the idea was popular and the team ended up
being larger, having 9 people involved. Here’s who was in the Soundy team:

“The
evening of the first day was the hardest”, said Marit. After a long week at their
day jobs and a trip to Pärnu, everybody was exhausted. However, everyone was
crazy in love with the business idea and immediately started brainstorming
about the next steps. Within the next 6 hours, the team got to know each other
and everyone’s skill set, divided responsibilities and tasks and agreed upon
goals. “We knew that the plan will probably change several times, but we were
happy to go to bed at 3am, knowing that we share the same vision and goals”,
said Marit.

Day 2 – fun and
work!

The
second day really went by quickly – having fun and hacking. During the day, the
team managed to complete the first prototype of the app. You can see the
initial excitement about the prototype from the video where Marit and Caroline
test the app for the first time:

Our
marketing wizards (Uku, Kaisa-Triin, Kaspar, Caroline) also created the
website, Facebook page, Twitter account and Instagram and started uploading
content to them. Here’s where you can check out the different channels:

Our
creative designers, Aleksanda and Maarja, were able to put together an amazing
visual identity for Soundy already in the first 24 hours.

Day 3 – Bug scrub
and demo

Hard
work continued on the third day and social media following gathered speed: more
than 250 likes on Facebook, more than 350 likes for the Facebook photo of the
team, more than 70 likes on Instagram, more than 50 early bird users signed up
to test the app.

And
then, as by Murphy’s law, everything crashed! The app was not working at the
last checkpoint, the website was down, and the Facebook campaign ended up being
useless without the website. That all created extra work for the team to get
everything ready for the final pitching session! It took the coordinated
efforts of the whole team to get the issues solved, while Marit had to keep her
focus on preparing for the evening’s pitching.

It
was suggested to work on the final pitch the whole day. Soundy’s experience
shows that this advice should be taken seriously. Presenting your idea and product
is actually harder to do than it may seem. Team Soundy worked long on the
pitch, but still, looking at the video again (starting at 18:40 on http://garage48.org/events/parnu)
we know what we want to improve in the future.

Having
the app finished, visual identity created and the social media channels active,
guaranteed Soundy positive feedback from the audience and a special prize from
TransferWise!

Follow-up

The
team is excited to continue working on the app also after the hackathon. The
exact plans are still being discussed – time will tell who will form the main
team in the long run. What is certain is that there are plenty of people
interested in testing the app, so the team is aiming at releasing the app to an
initial test group within the next few days.

To
stay posted on how the app is doing, follow Soundy on Facebook, Instagram or
Twitter!